Facebook ends 2020 on high note, usage and revenue skyrocketed during pandemic

American technology company Facebook ended 2020 on a high note. Its fourth-quarter earnings reached more than twenty-eight million dollars thanks to the skyrocketing screen time in the past year. According to The Verge, Facebook is up all around, with more than 1.84 billion people using its main social network at least once a day in December 2020, which is an eleven per cent year-over-year increase. As of December 31, 2020, more than 2.8 billion people check Facebook at least once a month, which is a twelve per cent jump from the year before.

Measuring the usage of its bundled family of applications which includes Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, a metric the company refers to as "family active people," the numbers are even better. More than 2.6 billion people check at least one of Facebook's apps every day, while more than 3.3 billion people check one of the apps once a month. Facebook's 'Other' category, which includes its Portal video chat devices and Oculus virtual reality business, also fared quite well last quarter, with a 156 per cent jump in revenue to $885 million.

Last quarter included the launch of Facebook's second-generation wireless Quest headset, the Quest 2, and Portal devices have seen surging sales all year as people shifted to remote work and virtual hangouts at home. But it's not all good news for Facebook looking ahead. As per The Verge, the company says it will "continue to face significant uncertainty as we manage through a number of cross currents in 2021" in its earnings report, signalling concerns the company won't be able to maintain the same pace of year-over-year growth as it enters the second half of 2021